Tuesday, May 26, 2015

This article is reprinted from my Psychic Vibrations column in the Skeptical Inquirer, September/October, 2007. I am reprinting it because it describes an important piece of UFO history that is not otherwise available on-line. It contains some updates and revisions. It also gives me an opportunity to share some great photos of UFO history.

Betty Hill’s Last Hurrah – A Secret UFO Symposium in New Hampshire

One of the most curious events to come out of the Great Internet Stock Bubble was the so-called “Encounters at Indian Head” project, whose very existence has been kept unknown to the public until just now [2007]. The symposium was prepared under a shroud of secrecy that was amazingly effective, given the decades-long inability of most top UFOlogists to behave responsibly about anything. Organized by the late Karl Pflock, author of Roswell – Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (Prometheus, 2000) and the British Fortean author Peter Brookesmith, the event was funded by Joe Firmage, the Silicon Valley then-multimillionaire who seems determined do whatever it takes to bring the public into an even higher state of extraterrestrial awareness.

Betty Hill chats with Eddie Bullard (left) and Hilary Evans. On the right is "junior," sculpted by Marjorie Fish.

In September of 2000, I traveled from California to New Hampshire to participate in the secret “stealth” UFO symposium. The subject was the alleged 1961 UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, the first such incident reported in the U.S., made famous by John Fuller’s 1966 book The Interrupted Journey, then even more so by the 1975 NBC-TV movie, The UFO Incident. Firmage was covering all our expenses, and even paid us for the rights to the papers we were writing, which would be published as a book. The purpose of the symposium was, simply, to find out what really happened to Betty and Barney Hill. The plan was that nobody would find out about even the existence of the symposium until the book containing its published proceedings appeared ‘out of the blue,’ presumably creating a sensation. The symposium came off exactly as planned, a tribute to the skills of the late Karl Pflock.

The event was held at the Indian Head Resort, just a stone’s throw from the spot where Betty and Barney allegedly saw the UFO cross the road and hover right in front of their car. The setting and accommodations were unarguably splendid, the company surprisingly congenial. UFOlogists have a reputation for feuding like Hatfields and McCoys, even those who are in general agreement. Probably the high level of the discussion was due to the organizers’ careful decision to exclude those UFOlogists who have a reputation for insufferable behavior, whatever their knowledge of the subject. Bravo, Karl. The pre-symposium secrecy ensured that we would not be troubled by the press, the curious, or by certain UFOlogists well known for being pushy and obnoxious.

However, the insistence in the nondisclosure agreement for post-event secrecy was more difficult to understand. In January 2001 Pflock announced the “suspension” of the Indian Head project to its participants. The ongoing internet stock collapse undoubtedly cut into Firmage’s discretionary spending, with the once high-flying company he founded, U.S. Web (later merged with CKS and March First) now bankrupt and liquidated. Still, Firmage paid every cent promised to the participants. With Karl’s death on June 5 2006, I presumed that the project was defunct, and that the non-disclosure requirement might last indefinitely. But Karl’s widow, Mary Martinek, completed the editing, and the result is the volume “Encounters at Indian Head”, published by Anomalist Books .

Karl Pflock gave Betty Hill this T-shirt.

The Grande Dame of UFOlogy, the late Betty Hill herself, was present to guide us through a re-enactment of the entire “abduction” scenario, assisted by her niece Kathy Marden, who knew the story almost as well as Betty did. I’d met Betty several times before. She regaled us with stories about her literally hundreds of UFO sightings occurring after her initial UFO “abduction.” She claims that she organized an entire “Invisible College” of scientists from top laboratories who went out with her to observe and study these UFOs, who gathered reams of documentation and data on the UFOs, then apparently flushed it all down the toilet, as it was their intention to merely study the UFOs, and not publish anything about them. Several of the more naïve participants spoke of how listening to Mrs. Hill had made it more difficult for them to accept the reality of her accounts, as if Mrs. Hill’s wild stories had not been well-known in UFOlogy for at least twenty-five years. It was the way she told of greeting the extraterrestrials with a jovial “Hi, Guys!” that stuck in the throat of several of the participants.Not a single participant in the symposium was willing to describe the Betty Hill we heard first-hand as a credible witness; nonetheless, a number of them still were inclined to accept her story of alien abduction, including Karl Pflock. The organizers had wisely chosen to send Betty Hill away before we began the actual discussions, as they realized it would be impossible for us to objectively discuss the mental state of a kindly but delusional old lady who was sitting in our midst.

Most of the symposium participants were well known in the UFO and Fortean worlds. Peter Brookesmith of Fortean Times magazine, clearly the junior partner as co-organizer, showed himself to be a no-nonsense fellow who also took the partying aspect of the conference very seriously. The good times quaffing with Peter, Karl, and Karl’s wife Mary were memorable. Another Brit in attendance was Hilary Evans, whose writings sometimes seemed to me a bit woozy but who in person seemed sensible enough. Two participants were present only virtually. Walter N. Webb, who began a first-hand investigation of the Hill case a month after it occurred in 1961, and Martin Kottmeyer, who writes amazingly perceptive papers without ever leaving his farm in central Illinois, participated from a distance.

Our Field Trip to the "Close Encounter" site, just south of Indian Head

Looking south from the "Close Encounter" site. The freeway had not yet been built in 1961.

In addition to the conference sessions, we took a Field Trip. First we took the short drive to where the UFO Close Encounter allegedly occurred, just south of the hotel. According to Betty, the Close Encounter site is on the east side of Rt. 3, just north of the present Rt. 93 freeway interchange (exit 33). She showed us where Barney left the car in the middle of the road with the engine running, while he grabbed binoculars from the trunk to get a good look at the aliens. Betty also guided us to the alleged “capture site”, a small, sandy clearing in the woods just off Mill Brook Rd., which goes off NH State Route 175 to the east near Thornton. However, Barney and Betty Hill much earlier had indicated a “capture site” in a different location. [GPS trekkers will want to know that the "capture site" Betty took us to was at 43 deg 54.529’ N, 71 deg 39.852’ W., elevation 662 ft.] One driver, seeing the small crowd in the woods, stopped to ask if there was a moose on the loose (tourists often travel these back roads seeking Moose Encounters); I replied “no,” but didn’t have the inclination to explain that we were chasing UFOs. Someone else did, and the driver sped away.

We're following the leader, the leader, the leader: Betty Hill guides us to the alleged Capture Site.

You can learn a lot about a UFO case by visiting the site that you can’t learn by reading. Driving from the “Close Encounter” site to the “capture” site, I was surprised to see how many quaint little New England towns lie between them. While driving frantically, allegedly being pursued by the UFO at close range, the Hills must have driven through the towns of North Woodstock, then Woodstock, West Thornton, and then Thornton. The speed limit in (and around) these towns is 30 MPH. Even granting that these sleepy little towns, which look like they’ve come out of Norman Rockwell portraits of New England life, would be quiet around midnight, it seems impossible that nobody at all would have noticed a car madly speeding down Rt. 3, screeching around corners, running stop signs and traffic signals, with a low-level UFO in close pursuit. This is related to another great puzzle, to wit: why is it that we never receive reports of UFOs coming in menacingly close, but following someone else’s car?

Examining Betty's "Capture Site": no sign of any UFOs.

We even had an evening screening of relevant science fiction films, including the very episode of Outer Limits that is suggested by Kottmeyer to have inspired Barney Hill’s description of the aliens’ “wrap-around eyes.” There was much discussion of the possible influence of the films on the Hills’ account. Firmage sat by himself watching the films, saying nothing. He spent much of his time during the symposium sessions glued to the phone in the hotel lobby, no doubt negotiating major business deals back in Silicon Valley. His participation was slight. I did have a chance to speak with him for a few minutes during the first evening session. He confidently expounded about how one dissident physicist or another had come up with a theory showing that it is possible to do the things that UFOs allegedly do: travel faster than light, defy gravity, etc. For him, this settled the matter: such things were possible, and we should drop our present-day prejudices. He seemed not to appreciate the objection that the great majority of physicists were unconvinced by unsupported speculative theories, or else he seemed not to care. Firmage is an impressive, dynamic speaker, but not such a good listener.

Ultimately, no agreement was reached concerning whether the Hills’ story was real or imagined. Each participant (except for Greg Sandow) expounds his viewpoint at length in a chapter in the book. Eddie Bullard, Greg Sandow, Walter Webb, and Karl Pflock argued that the Hills’ abduction account should probably be taken literally. I argued strongly for the opposite, as did Peter Brookesmith. Martin Kottmeyer and Hilary Evans agreed that the explanation was more likely to be psychological than physical. Dennis Stacy, a former editor of the MUFON Journal and the publisher of the symposium volume, limited himself to carefully chronicling and recounting the incident. However, in private conversation he confessed to difficulties with accepting the Hills’ account. Sociologist Marcello Truzzi pronounced it impossible to come to any conclusion whatsoever. [Truzzi was a co-founder of CSICOP in 1976, with Paul Kurtz. In hindsight it's obvious that their planned cooperation was doomed to fail.]

It was clear that the participants who had not previously met Betty Hill were dismayed and/or disappointed after hearing her ramble on glibly about things that could not possibly be true. However, there were rationalizations aplenty as to why we should believe her claims made in 1961, but not afterwards. I also felt that co-organizer Karl Pflock, and sponsor Joe Firmage, had expected some sort of pro-Hills consensus to emerge from the discussions when all of the “facts” supporting it were martialled – and were rather disappointed when it did not. I found it puzzling that the book's progress accelerated after
Karl's death, especially since the book was virtually completed by 2001,
before he fell ill. When Betty's own statements
raised doubts even among those inclined to believe her story, Pflock
probably came to view the symposium as a tactical mistake. I suspected that Karl in essence sat on the project
because he was disappointed how it turned out, although Peter
Brookesmith assures me that this was not the case, and cites
difficulties in getting the book published. I spoke with Pflock on the phone several times after the conference, and each time he was downplaying the book, and the idea of getting it published. He did not seem enthusiastic or eager in any way to see it published. At least, that was my impression.

Almost seven years separated the symposium and its public revelation. It has now been fifteen years, and four of the participants have passed away: Marcello Truzzi, Karl Pflock, Hilary Evans, and Betty Hill. You can’t do this symposium again. As for Joe Firmage, he seems to have disappeared from the UFO scene completely. Whether he was able to hang on to any of the huge fortune he once had is unclear. He no longer operates his old website firmage.org, which used to contain earth-shaking ideas concerning UFOs, the future, and New Physics, his new website is somewhat toned-down by comparison. Firmage seems to have resurfaced, perhaps briefly, with the "9-11 Truther" crowd. Recent reports concerning Firmage's current activities do not sound good.

Now that a high(er)-resolution copy of the slide has been obtained, the group has used the de-blurring program Smart Deblur, which has cleared up the photo's blur amazingly well, enabling us to read much, even most, of the text. We now know exactly what the top line of the placard says:

﻿﻿﻿

"MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY"

There is now no doubt whatsoever that the "Roswell alien" is, in fact, the mummy of a child, exactly as many researchers suggested. Of course, Jaime Maussan, who orchestrated the Mexico City extravaganza, insisted that it could not be a mummy, and far too many people believed him. Here is an animated GIF version to help you read the letters:

﻿

Curt Collins, one of the members of the Roswell Slides Research Group, released this information on behalf of the team today on his Blog Blue Blurry Lines. His reading of the text on the placard is:

MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY

At the time of burial the body was clothed in a xxx-xxx cotton

shirt. Burial wrappings consisted of these small cotton blankets.

Last line: Xxxxxed by the X.I. Xxxxxx, San Francisco, California.

Researcher Ted Molczan suggests that the first word on the last line is "Donated," and the word before "San Francisco" is "Museum," which is very likely correct. Speaking of the Roswell Slides Research Group, Molczan makes the observation, "You folks solved in no more than 2-3 days what the promoters claimed not to have been able to solve in 3 years!"

The Smart Deblur program has been available at least since 2012, so there is no reason that the "Roswell Slides" promoters could not have done the same thing long ago. They, after all, had the high-resolution scans all along. But one suspects that the promoters did not want to find out what really was on the slides - that would have destroyed its presumed commercial value. Proving, beyond a shadow of any doubt, that everyone on the team promoting the "Roswell Slides" is either a scoundrel, a fool, or both.

The supposed "Roswell alien," with its incriminating placard - that was apparently deliberately blanked out in this
image that was shown in Mexico City!

Shortly after the deciphered placard was posted by Curt Collins, and people began asking exactly where did it come from - was it authentic? - the slides owner Adam Dew posted an image of the blurred placard on his site. Apparently he was trying to "come clean" about the placard that Maussan had blanked out, to minimize the damage to his own reputation.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

I was unwilling to drop any
money into the coffers of the scoundrels hyping the bogus "Roswell
Slides" in Mexico City. Jaime Maussan, promoter of the event, is notorious for his promotion of bogus photos and videos of UFOs, alien creatures, and other absurdities, such as a photo of a flying horse. The website for the Mexican UFO research group Alcione.org (in Spanish) lists "more than 40 frauds" that Maussan has promoted. However, being curious to see what was happening, I
followed the event on Twitter, #RoswellSlides. It occurred to me
that the best way to describe the event would be to simply share some of
the comments being made by those watching it.

One of the slides, from Twitter. Probably the sign reads something like,
"Dead alien from Zeta Reticuli.
Don't tell anyone about this! It's Top Secret!"

@SpatzieLover posted many good comments
and photos describing the show. Former Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, a
promised speaker, was a no-show. He appeared via video link, saying that his age of 84 made it difficult to travel.

Former Astronaut Edgar Mitchell saying we don't know what beings or plants are in the universe

Our planet is just one grain of sand on a huge beach

Edgar seeing the images says "They're certainly not human - looks
like what the little greys look like" [as if he would know for certain
what little grays look like]

She also had a good summary of what the ninety-year old military veteran Eleazar N. Benavides said (referred to as "Pfc. Benjamin" in Schmitt and Carey's book Witness to Roswell, incorrectly described by slides owner Adam Dew as a Lieutenant), who supposedly saw a real alien at Roswell in 1947:

Discussing arms/elbows/face being unusual. He tried not to look hard, concerned for future

Confirms this is what he saw in 1947. Says photo looks like after #ET deceased for a while

One's he saw were plumper, "a little more body" had more fat/tissue than this deceased one [as if we didn't know that a recent corpse would be plumper than a dessicated body whose head fell off]

@DinodeAlmeida:

"Events" like this are likely on top of the list of reasons why there is no open contact by any intelligent alien species

Paul Kimball (@paulkimballfilm) posted this photo of slides promoters Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey, with the
comment,
"Two con men hard at work simply repeating the same tall tales they have been telling for decades."

@DanPHodges posted this photo, with the comment
"Dolan not doing his credability any good by sharing a stage with known liars."

@JohnELTenney:

Maybe I've just been doing this a long time, I feel safe in saying these are some of the worst real alien photos I've seen

@cristiancontini:

#roswellslides A photo of a child mummy, an #epicfail NOT a smoking gun. Shame on ufologists that was on THIS.

@MartynScotton:

i feel so sorry for anybody that payed good money to see #Roswellslides can't believe @RichDolan was a part of this joke.

The celebrated Nick Pope, @nickpopemod, tried to emphasise the humor of the situation:

Underwhelmed by #roswellslides - having seen dead aliens when I ran the MoD's UFO project, I can tell you that's not what they look like :-)

As the most junior member of Majestic 12 I always get the jobs that none of my fellow conspirators want, like debunking the #roswellslides

Summarizing
the event on Facebook, Shepherd Johnson wrote, "From what I've
gathered on social media, Astronaut Mitchell was a no show, Hellyer took
astronaut's place, Dolan was there but didn't speak, auditorium at 40%
capacity, mostly CGI renderings of aliens, might have missed it but it
looked like only one slide, glitches in the online streaming, people on
twitter mostly mocking the event."

Friday, May 1, 2015

To follow up on my previous Blog posting, I am posting this guest article by George Wingfield. The opinions are his, not necessarily mine. Comments are welcome.

Robert Sheaffer

The
"Roswell Slides" depict Alien MATILDA

by George Wingfield

Most people will have
probably have lost interest in the highly dubious “Roswell Slides”
story by now so I hesitate to trouble any of you with it further.
However, since Jaime Maussan’s “UFO Special Event” is still a
week away, it’s worth looking at what it has been possible to
establish during the past month:

(2) They have nothing to
do with Roswell or any supposed flying saucer crash there in 1947.
The alleged Roswell connection has been deliberately devised to
attract and deceive UFO/alien believers who would probably not have
bothered with yet another of Maussan’s fake aliens from Mexico.

(3) Veteran UFO/Alien
fraudster Jaime Maussan and the man who first revealed the existence
of the Roswell Slides, Adam Dew, are quite aware of the slides’
real origin.

(4) The supposed story
of their origin involving Hilda Ray, finding the slides in a house
clearance in AZ, etc., is completely false apart from the fact that
some of the slides are marked "HILDA RAY" which is a sly
reference to RAY Santilli's fake alien "HILDA".

(5) This scam is
entirely similar to Ray Santilli's "Alien Autopsy" scam of
1995 and the fake alien and the photographic slides were produced by
the same people.

(6) The special effects
alien dummy was prepared and photographed by London based
circlemakers.org (Rob Irving, John Lundberg and Rod Dickinson) that
made alien dummy HILDA
for Santilli's Alien Autopsy film in the UK twenty years ago.

(7) The slides have been
specially prepared using old 1940s-style cardboard sleeves to hold
the transparency film so as to deceive UFO researchers that they
originate from 1947. It is unlikely they will ever be released now
as one could soon see they are fakes.

(8) The "UFO Special
Event" in Mexico City to be hosted by Jaime Maussan on May 5,
2015, exactly twenty years to the day after Santilli unveiled his
"Alien Autopsy" scam in 1995, has been planned to give
maximum publicity to the fraudulent claim that this is the ultimate
proof of a genuine alien. Maussan will play the same role as Santilli
did.

(9) The prime creator of
this new "Roswell” alien dummy, John Lundberg, was director of
the 2013 documentary film Mirage Men.
He sees the production of the slides and the Mexico City event as an
act of "ostension". That is, the displaying of a
supposedly genuine alien body (or photos, or replicas of an alien) to
UFO/alien believers whose faith will be reinforced since they are
meant to be unaware it is a scam.

(10) John Lundberg has
declined to answer questions about the Roswell Slides or admit that
he and his friends created this new hoax. He has also declined a
recent invitation to appear on The Paracast which would have allowed
hosts Gene Steinberg and Christopher O'Brien to question him about
his involvement.

It would be difficult to
appreciate the extent and the deviousness of the Roswell Slides
deception without being familiar with Ray Santilli’s Alien Autopsy
hoax of 1995 and the people who were behind that. That scam is
believed to have netted Santilli a million dollars or so from the
sale of copies of the film footage to TV channels, program makers,
film-makers and researchers worldwide such was the interest and the
demand from those who believed it to be genuine. With each copy of
the Alien Autopsy footage sold, Santilli provided a disclaimer saying
that he could not guarantee the material was genuine and that he had
to include the disclaimer for legal reasons. He did, of course, know
full well the film footage was faked and he should have been charged
with fraud anyway.

I researched the Alien
Autopsy scam at the time and was able to reveal the names of the
three chief hoaxers who had created the special effects alien dummy
and taken part in filming its supposed autopsy. My report on this
can still be found on the internet at:-

I have never had any
reason to withdraw what I wrote there twenty years ago and from that
time on Santilli’s dummy alien became known as Alien HILDA
(Hoaxed Irving-Lundberg-Dickinson Alien). Although there is no
doubt that the Alien Autopsy film was an elaborate hoax there are
still UFO/Alien believers who like to think it was genuine.

John Lundberg, the most
prominent of these three hoaxers, was the director of the 2013 film
documentary Mirage Men whose central character was the
arch-deceptionmonger of US ufology Richard Doty. Everyone who is
interested in the UFO subject should see this film which reveals just
how much of modern UFO mythology has been shaped by the campaign of
disinformation and deception woven by Doty and others based at
Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, during the 1980s. Lundberg has always
been fascinated –if not obsessed— by such deception and
disinformation which is one of the reasons that he made this film.
With the Roswell Slides he is attempting to supply more of the same.

These three hoaxers
started out by making crop circles in England during the early 1990s.
Although they admitted they were circlemakers they never admitted
making any specific formation. They justified what they did by
saying it was art –crop art— but denied the deception dimension
of what they were doing. One could say that their work was more like
that of an illusionist, or magician, than that of a regular artist.
From these beginnings they went on to fake UFO photographs and even
contrived UFO fly-bys using things similar to Chinese lanterns to
deceive Steven Greer and his CSETI people who went out on skywatches
in Wiltshire, England, during 1992. From crop circlemaking (or,
maybe one should say, circlefaking) and UFOfaking, these three
progressed to alienfaking in 1995 with the production of alien dummy
HILDA for Ray
Santilli.

Their circlemaking
activities and their circlemakers.org website led by degrees to
lucrative contracts to make crop circles for a whole variety of
customers such as UK newspapers, TV channels, film-makers, companies
and corporations who wanted their logos --or maybe some publicity
ad-- imprinted in the wheatfields of England and then photographed
from the air. The team of three, sometimes with additional helpers,
made crop circles to order in the UK, the USA, Japan, Australia, New
Zealand and other countries often charging many thousands of dollars
a time plus expenses.

One of their best known
crop circles in recent years was made for a computer electronics
manufacturer in December 2013. John Lundberg and Rob Irving were
commissioned to make a huge elaborate crop circle near Chualar, CA,
for Nvidia who wanted to publicize their ultrafast Tegra microchip.
The chip was announced a week later at the Consumer Electronics Show
in Las Vegas. Lundberg and Irving’s giant crop circle resembled a
vast replica of the microchip. With most commissions
Circlemakers.org doesn’t reveal its authorship of the crop circles
which they produce but sometimes it is disclosed and also the fact
that a large elaborate circle like the Nvidia one can cost tens of
thousands of dollars.

If the crop circle side of
the business is the most lucrative one then alienfaking commissions
are the most secretive. Apart from the Alien Autopsy and the Roswell
Slides no other such productions are publicly known nor what is
charged for such productions. One can be certain that these
alienfakers watch the reactions of their target audience closely on
blogsites and websites dealing with such matters. Acceptance by
members of the UFO community is important since everything depends on
belief.

John Lundberg popped up
recently on one of The Paracast forums dealing with the “Roswell
Slides” which he had joined with a view to checking the reactions
of those who are fascinated anything to do with Roswell. On the
forum he called himself ‘Ostension’ which is probably a term that
is lost on many people.

Having
lived years ago in staunchly Catholic Ireland I am very aware that
"ostension" is the displaying of the sacrament at the altar
during the mass so that it could receive the adoration of the
communicants who have come up from the congregation. In these
secular days some may be unaware that the sacrament is the bread (or
communion wafer) and the wine that communicants receive during the
mass. Transubstantiation is the supposed change whereby, according to
the teaching of the Catholic Church, the bread and wine used as the
communion sacrament become --in actual reality --
the body and the blood of Christ.
Not
that many people, even Catholics, actually believe this today, but
the parallel here to the displaying of a "genuine" alien
body --or at least a supposed photographic slide of one-- at a
meeting of UFO True Believers in Mexico City is not lost on some of
us. That's a real piece of what Lundberg would call Perception
Management for you. If such ostension actually works, one can
assume that it will fill the coffers of that celebrated UFO high
priest Jaime Maussan.

There
is no other definition of ostension in the dictionary but John
Lundberg defines it in the following terms on his Wikipedia page:

"Entire
legend plots can be reduced to an allusive action. If a narrative is
widely known individuals may become involved in real life activities
based on all or part of that narrative. This is ostension in action;
when legend alters or shapes the behavior of people. Real events
patterned on an urban legend, fact mirroring fiction.
In a nutshell? To folklorists, ostension is the real-life
occurrence of events described by a legend. Legends we live."

Ostension
is apparently John Lundberg’s justification for creating the Alien
Autopsy and now the so-called Roswell Slides. There’s money in it
too but to simple folk like me this is simply an attempt at mass
deception that is entirely similar to the deception practiced by
Richard Doty and his colleagues with regard to the UFO subject back
in the 1980s. So those of us who are interested in the UFO subject
should be acutely aware that there are people out there who are
seeking to manipulate our belief systems by various forgeries, fakery
and deception.

Finally
I think this new alien dummy, successor to the infamous HILDA,
needs a new name which really should be MATILDA.
That, if you hadn’t already guessed, stands for Maussan’s
Maussan’s Absurd Trick: Irving-Lundberg-Dickinson Alien.

MATILDA
is particularly appropriate since that was the name of the little
girl in Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary
Tales
(1907) who told such dreadful lies:

Matilda
told such Dreadful Lies,
It
made one gasp and stretch one’s Eyes,Her
Aunt, who from her Earliest Youth, Had
kept a Strict Regard for Truth, Attempted
to believe Matilda: The
effort very nearly killed her ……..

Maybe
one day a real
extraterrestrial alien will catch up with Maussan, Dew, Lundberg and
Irving and if that ever happens one wonders if they’d know what to
do. Perhaps they would suffer a similar fate to the wretched Matilda
who everyone had ceased to believe?

Is it possible that the now-famous Roswell Slides, set to be publicly unveiled very soon on Cinco de Mayo in Mexico City, are a hoax intended to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the infamous Ray Santilli Alien Autopsy hoax, possibly even by the same people who created the Santilli alien? The slides are to be publicly revealed in a big shindig in Mexico City on May 5, sponsored by the Mexican UFO fabulist Jaime Maussan, who has a long history of promoting bogus photos of UFOs and supposed alien creatures.This is the exact twentieth anniversary of when the Santilli hoax video was first publicly shown, a fact that has not gone unnoticed.

The 1995 "Alien Autopsy" video of Ray Santilli, now an admitted hoax, but one that made large sums of
money for its perpetrators.

This "innocent scenario" is beginning to look increasingly unlikely. On April 29 , the French skeptic Gilles Fernandez wrote a Blog entry titled "What if? The Roswell Slides Saga as a Social Experiment or a Hoax of some sort?" In it he pointed out some obvious problems in the scenario we are given by Dew and the other slide promoters. One of the slides in the collection, supposedly in a slide frame that was only used in the 1940s, shows an automobile that was not manufactured until 1958. And the photos, also from the 1940s that are supposed to show Bernard and Hilda Ray, show individuals who are obviously decades older than the Rays would have been at that time. Some slides in the collection are compared to genuine 1940s Kodachrome slides, and the differences are obvious. Fernandez asks whether it is possible that "the set of the 400 slides was put together from various sources, maybe even from eBuyers or physical markets, and a story was concocted, and the two slides were inserted?"

UFO researcher George Wingfield has even stronger reservations. Back in 1995, he wrote a piece in the British publication Flying Saucer Review accusing three men of hoaxing the yet-unconfessed Santilli alien autopsy video: John Lundberg, Robert Irving, and, and Rod Dickinson, based on their involvement with Ray Santilli, their experience in producing special effects, and their reputation as Crop Circle makers. In that Flying Saucer review article Wingfield wrote that "The alien is, of course, called HILDA, which, in case you hadn't guessed, stands for Hoaxed Irving-Lundberg-Dickinson Alien." In 1995, RAY Santilli's hoaxed alien is satirically named HILDA - and now we have HILDA RAY. It seems as if the hoaxers may have signed their work, as an inside joke.

the “Roswell Alien Slides” were produced in a similar manner and supplied to targeted individuals likely to take the bait. If that’s right, the #1 suspects are John Lundberg and Rob Irving. Both of them were in California in December 2013 where they were commissioned to make a huge elaborate crop circle near Chualar, CA, for Nvidia who wanted to publicize their ultrafast Tegra microchip.

Wingfield concluded,

Apart from their work behind and in front of the camera, Lundberg and Dickinson were the experts who made foam latex dummies for a TV series on UK's Channel 4 back then called "Crapston Villas". If Lundberg and Irving have been up to their tricks again on this 20th anniversary of Santilli’s alien autopsy hoax, it seems very likely they may have been the creators of the “Roswell Alien Slides”.

John Lundberg is now well-known as one of the Crop Circle makers at circlemakers.org. He is also the director of the documentary film Mirage Men. Based on the book of the same name by Mark Pilkington, it is a look at the purported role of government-sponsored disinformation in shaping the UFO phenomenon. I wrote to Lundberg asking for his comments on this. He might have replied something like, "I had nothing to do with either the Santilli Alien, or the Roswell Slides." Instead, he chose to reply in poetic and evasive terms, which I read as acknowledging that he was involved in those matters, but was unwilling to say so publicly. But one never knows what is to be taken seriously when dealing with Mirage Men.

If the Roswell Slides are indeed a hoax as is here suggested, it is certainly the most elaborate and sophisticated hoax since, well, the Santilli Alien Autopsy of twenty years ago. It almost feels like an act of art vandalism to betray their secrets.

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About Me

Robert Sheaffer is a writer with a lifelong interest in astronomy and the question of life on other worlds. He is one of the leading skeptical investigators of UFOs, a founding member of the UFO Subcommittee of the well-known Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, formerly CSICOP). He is also a founding director and past Chairman of the Bay Area Skeptics, a local skeptics' group in the San Francisco Bay area .
Mr. Sheaffer has written the "Psychic Vibrations" column in The Skeptical Inquirer for over 30 years, and his book "Psychic Vibrations" reprints some of those columns. He is also the author of "UFO Sightings" (Prometheus Books, 1998), and has appeared on many radio and TV programs. His writings and reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as OMNI, Scientific American, Spaceflight, Astronomy, The Humanist, Free Inquiry, Reason, and others.
Mr. Sheaffer lives near San Diego, California. He has worked as a data communications engineer in the Silicon Valley, and sings in professional opera productions.